AND THE DIVAGATIONS OF DISCONSOLATE IMOGENE
“I’ tell you ’bout that, mare of mine--the more you holler ‘whoa!’
I’ve taught the whelp to clench her teeth and h’ist her tail and go!
And when we got clus’ down to Clark’s, I thought for jest a sell,
I’d make believe we’d run away. So I began to yell,
And old man Pease he hugged his knees and gaffled to his pail,
And now, my boy, purraps you think that turn-out didn’t sail! ”
--“Narrative of Bart of Brighton.
In the mid-afternoon Hiram checked his weary horses on the swell of a
hill that overlooked a placid reach of farms.
“I guess we’ll stop and provender up at that first house, there, Sime,”
he stated. “I’m ’bout starved, and I reckon the plugs are, too. You
hold the reins a minute whilst I lay down a little law to the invisible
lady.”
He threw open the rear doors and surveyed the swollen and tear-streaked
features of ’Missy Mayo. She met his gaze for a moment only, and then
began to sob again.
“Ashamed of yourself, ain’t you?” the showman demanded.
She bobbed woful assent with her head and crooked her arm before her
face.
“Women,” pursued Hiram, relentlessly, “are ostriches when they ain’t
wild-cats, and from me that knows ’em all and that’s been scratched
criss-cross by wild-cats and has owned ostriches and had a nat’rally
sweet and affectionate disposition soured by women’s actions, you can
take that say-so as gospel. It ain’t no advance agent’s talk. I’ve been
with the main show, and I _know_. You’re an ostrich. Take your head out
from under the chip and look at me.”
She obeyed, huddling herself on her knees on the blankets.
“I know just what you are goin’ to tell me if I begin to ask you
questions,” he said. “You’ll take on like a kitten with her tail in a
crack and tell me you are so, _so_ sorry and that you’ll never do it
again, and that he promised you nice dresses and di’mond rings and
nothin’ to do except to let your poor, dear, oopsy-soopsy little hands
grow white, and so you couldn’t help yourself, and you tried to be good
and love your husband and stay at home, and you couldn’t, so there!”
“But I do love my husband,” she sobbed. “And that man did say all those
things to me, and he did say I had broken up my husband’s home with his
people and that they all hated me, and that my poor Wat would be better
off if I were to go away.”
“And so you thought it all over and cried off by yourself and planned
how noble it would be for you to leave him to be happy ever after, with
his folks boarding him, and you would go away into the wide, wide world
and sacrifice yourself just as that wife did that you’d read about who
went backward outdoors into the night with her black hood on--they allus
wear black hoods--waving her hands and sending back kisses toward the
bedroom where her husband was sleepin’, and sayin’, ‘Farewell, I go to
save thee!’ That was jest the whole story, wa’n’t it?”
“Oh, Mr. Look,” began the girl, eagerly, “that was the truth of it--you
do know it all--you can appreciate----”
“Shut up,” roared the showman; “talk about prohibiting the sale of rum
in this State,” he snarled, glancing up at Peak; “they ought to make it
a jail crime to sell a dime novel to a woman unless she’s got cross eyes
and a club foot and a hare-lip--and then it wouldn’t allus be safe to
let her have one of ’em. There’s more cussedness sucked up out of one
of them such novels than you can get through straws at a bar. Now, Mrs.
Ostrich, I ain’t got any time to stand here and tell you how many kinds
of a byjoosly fool you are, for there’s a team li’ble to come along any
minute. But I’m goin’ to tell you sometime, and I’ve seen enough of
the world and of cheap renegades of men to make your hair curl when you
think what you’ve got out of. It’s me that’s goin’ to take you home in
this cart--and it’s me that thought up this way of gettin’ you there
without ev’rybody knowin’ that you run away and left your husband.”
The wife dragged herself on her knees to the opening and clasped her
hands.
“Mr. Look,” she wailed, “it’s all true what you say. But I ain’t ever
had any mother that I can remember. I didn’t have anyone to tell me the
things that a girl ought to know. I don’t blame you for talking hard
to me. I deserve it. But I want to do right. Indeed, I do, Mr. Look. If
you’ll take me home I’ll always stay there. I’m hungry to stay there.
Oh, how I’ve wished I hadn’t gone--wished so all this long day and I’ve
cried my eyes out wishing so. I know I don’t love anyone but my husband.
Take me back to him, Mr. Look, and I’ll never want to be anything but a
true wife to him again--never, never, never!”
Her fluttering hands grasped the sides of the van and she leaned her
convulsed face toward him.
“So your mother died when you was young?” Hiram inquired. His tone had
softened.
“I never knew who my mother was.”
“Mine died and left me under fourteen and Phin a baby,” said the
showman, looking off across the fields and blinking his eyes. “It’s sort
of--sort of startin’ anyone back-handed into the world without a mother
to kind of walk hand in hand with up to where the paths split. Bad for a
man, worse for a woman.”
There was silence for a little time, except for the girl, who sobbed
with quick indrawings of the breath.
“Let’s see, Sime,” said Hiram, trying to keep his voice steady and
matter-of-fact, “I ain’t ever asked you how it was with your fam’ly. Was
you brought up by a mother?”
“I was bound out from an orphan asylum when I was eight,” replied the
giant, turning away his face and fingering the seam of a patch on
his knee. “A farmer took me and he made me wear pants made out of a
butcher’s frock, and I never got but five weeks’ schoolin’, ’cause I
couldn’t stand ’em laughin’ at me.”
“Three of us pretty much of a stripe,” sighed the showman. “Each of
us with an out of some kind. Nothin’ to be proud of, any of us. Can’t
expect much else, maybe! I tell ye, Sime, I know how you felt about the
school bus’ness. After they folded mother’s hands--and I can see ’em
folded now just as I did when I tiptoed into the settin’-room where
they’d laid her out--I didn’t have no more jelly tarts to set out on the
desk when I opened my dinner-pail at school, and I used to stay in
at recess so that the girls couldn’t see the holes in the seat of my
pants.”
He stood and looked away and fingered the folds of skin on his wrinkled
neck as though there were an ache there.
“I’m glad to believe,” he said softly and brokenly, “that God ain’t mean
enough to let dead mothers ever know how their little gaffers get along
after their mother hands are folded and they can’t ’tend and do any
longer.”
After a little time he turned to the wife, and his eyes were wet.
“I ain’t all hard spots, sissy,” he affirmed impulsively. “Most often
it’s the softest places that have the hardest calluses over ’em. I’m a
pretty soft old fool, myself. Most think I ain’t, but I am. I’ve made my
mistakes and they was bad ones. Sime, there, has made just as bad ones
as me. You’ve made yours, sissy, but don’t make any more--don’t!”
He patted her cheek with a tenderness that no one ever saw before in
Hiram Look.
“We’ve sort of found out each other all at once. Let’s call this place
here ‘Orphan Hill’ and always remember it. Let’s kind of brace from now
on. We can’t be angels, none of us. We’ve been too much handicapped. But
we can brace!”
He didn’t seem to dare to trust himself to talk any longer, but closed
the doors on the girl and called to her that she must be very quiet
while the van stood in the farmer’s yard, explaining that he would
secure food for her.
Then he perched himself beside Peak and drove on, each busy with his own
thoughts.
The woman of the house promptly appeared at the door when the van swung
into the yard.
“Well, it’s best for you that you did stop on your way back,” she
snapped. “You never paid a single mite of attention to me when you went
past this morning, but kept goin’ like the mill-tail of Tophet. I said
to my husband that peddlers’ teams was gettin’ pretty stuck up, prancin’
past with four horses and not payin’ no attention when, a lady comes
to the door sacking a bag of rags. Now here they be. Have you got your
st’ilyards? I suppose you have and that you cheat as much as----”
“That woman seems to be the open-faced, self-windin’ kind,” Hiram
growled to Peak through the corner of his mouth. Then he interrupted
her.
“You’d better buy a good pair of far-sighted specs from the next peddler
that comes along this way, marm,” he suggested with some insolence.
“You’ll be able to tell the diff’rence, then, between a tin rag peddler
or a rag tin peddler, or whatever you call ’em, and two gentlemen
ridin’ out for pleasure to take the air. Now, to come to bus’ness--will
you sell me a baitin’ for my horses, and three lunches--two to be et on
the spot and one to be took away?”
Her first impulse, evidently, was to refuse this blunt request. But
Hiram waved a bill at her. She called a freckled youth from the barn and
continued to stare at the vehicle and the two strangers.
When the boy led away the horses, after Hiram and Peak had unhooked
them from the cart, the woman broke her silence and there was suppressed
excitement in her tones.
“I’ve got you placed. You’re the circus man that’s come back to live
down to P’lermo, and this is one of your carts, and you’ve come up here
to help catch that dratted el’phunt that’s been rampagin’ ’round here
since noon. You ain’t come none too soon, Mr. Circuser. You’ll have a
nice bill to pay in this neighbourhood--and you can start right in by
settlin’ with us first of all. You come here, the two of ye.”
In silent amazement the men followed her around the ell.
“There’s where he come through,” she rasped, pointing to two lengths of
a picket fence laid flat; “there’s where he went out.” On the opposite
side of the garden more lengths of fence were cast down. “Half the
pickets busted where he stepped on ’em! Three of our little Sopsyvine
trees knocked down, and there--look there!”
She had evidently reserved this climax. She pointed to the slope of a
little hillock.
“Two webs of ‘Fruit of the Loom’ that was bleach-in’, all trampled and
torn and gurried up! A ding-blamed el’phunt and a dozen men skyhootin’
acrost herer without aye, yes or no and not payin’ the least attention
to anything underfoot! I say if you’re the circus man from P’lermo
you’ve got a good nice bill to settle in these parts.”
“_My_ elephant!” demanded Hiram, amazedly, tapping himself with his
knuckles on his breast and staring from Peak to the woman.
“I don’t know of any other fool that’s keepin’ el’phunts for pets or
raisin’ ’em for market,” she retorted. “If an old gray gob o’ meat
with ragged ears and dirty feet as big as saucepans--as you can see by
the smooches on my unbleached cotton--is your el’phunt, then it _is_
your el’phunt with a passul of howlin’ men after him, and my husband
chasin’ off along with the rest instead of stayin’ here and protectin’
his home and his wife.”
“Do you suppose it’s Imogene got away?” gasped Hiram, staring at Peak.
“Well, for a guess I should say it was,” replied that friend,
unconsolingly. “Elephants are not as common as woodchucks around here.”
The two men stared away up the hillock and across the field to the fence
that bordered it. There was no need of asking the woman the course of
the parade. A huge gap in the fence and torn bushes in the adjacent
woodlot marked the route.
“I consider that a man that introduces el’phunts into a quiet country
neighbourhood is worse than he would be if he put damanite bumbs under
folks’ houses,” sputtered the woman.
“You just shut your mouth for a minute and let me think, will ye?”
roared Hiram. “Sime,” he went on after a little reflection, “you’ve
got to go along with the--the----” He saw the woman’s eyes fixed on
him inquisitively and he checked himself. “You deliver the goods,” he
directed, “right to Phin and he’ll do the rest. Get along just as
soon as the horses are baited and don’t forget the lunch for the--the
gayzelle,” he added for the benefit of the curious woman. “I’ll take
my grub in my hand and chase up Imogene. There’s no knowin’ what them
farmers will da with her if I don’t. Here’s a two-dollar bill,” he
said hastily to the woman. “That’s lib’ral pay for three lunches and
hoss-baitin’.”
“I never heard of gay-zelles eatin’ lunch,” she said, suspicion in her
tones. “I s’pose you’ve got a wild man o’ Borneo in that cart to let
loose on us next.”
“It’s no matter what we’ve got,” retorted Hiram. “You give me my grub in
my hand and let me get away.”
He went stamping into the kitchen and she foh lowed him with some
apprehension. Five minutes later he trotted at his best gait across
the field along the trail of Imogene and her pursuers, munching ham
sandwiches and scattering crumbs upon the breeze.
A stern chase is always a long one, and after Hiram had crossed the
woodlot he found himself on a parallel road where there were still other
indignant women and clamorous farmers to shake off when they hailed him
as the presumptive owner of the fugitive elephant and sought to collect
damages.
“A Kansas cyclone is a kitten beside of her,” he muttered as he surveyed
one scene of devastation after another and hurried on.
“Them farmers must be aggravatin’ Imogene something awful to make her
cut up this way. But I don’t blame her. If I had a trunk and weighed
twenty-seven hundred pounds I’d smash down what she ain’t finished up.
She and me agrees on farmers.”
So, scattering right and left profanity and promises to settle, he
toiled on, his tall hat in his hand and the perspiration streaming
down his face. There was no such thing as keeping the trail in a team.
Through copses and meadows, down water-courses and valleys and across
farm dooryards the animal had led her pursuers. The trail was devious,
too, as though Imogene, harassed on all sides, had kept turning, either
to attack or dodge. In one place a considerable array of various samples
of trousers cloth fluttering from a barbed wire fence indicated that
there had been a hasty retreat. Hiram stopped and surveyed this scene
with grim satisfaction.
“You pocketed ’em in this corner, dum ’em,” he muttered. “Bully for
you, old gal!”
The showman, in his many twistings and turnings along the trail, stopped
taking note of his general direction of progress, and just before dusk,
leg-weary and panting, found himself coursing down a hillock that
was strangely familiar. He suddenly stopped in the midst of trampled,
tattered and bedraggled cotton sheeting and stared about him. He had
come’ back to the place where he had started on the chase and for a
moment thought he had unconsciously crossed his own trail somewhere and
had followed back. A woman’s voice, shrill with anger, hailed him from
the ell window.
“’Tain’t enough, is it, for your tarnation old el’-phunt to hooroosh
over our primises once, but she and her rag-tag must come back and
slambang through again!”
The farmer came out of the barn, mopping his brow.
“They ain’t five minutes ahead of ye,” he said. “I should ’a’ kept
right on chasin’, but I had to stop off and do my chores. I reckon
they’ll catch her pretty quick. She’s about beat out.”
Hiram slouched down the hill, puffing.
“But there ain’t no use in ’em catchin’ her,” continued the farmer.
“It will be like catchin’ smallpox. You can’t do nothin’ sensible with
it when you do get it.”
“If you infernal fools would let her alone she’d be all right and go
home,” bellowed Hiram over his shoulder as he leaped across the highway
fence and began to run with his last remaining strength.
A quarter of an hour later, after struggling in the dusk through an
alder swamp, he came out in the rear of some farm buildings. He saw men
sprinkled in straggly line about a barn, men who leaned on pitchforks
and clubs and guns.
“Where is she?” he shouted at the first man he came across--an
individual who was scratched by bushes and brambles and whose blue,
drilling overalls hung about him in shreds.
“Ain’t much need of askin’ that if you’ll listen a minit,” returned the
elephant hunter surlily.
From the bam came frantic neighings of horses and melancholy lowings
of cows. An occasional crash, rattle or clatter indicated that either
Imogene was trying to get comfortably into a safe shelter, in spite of
the interference of farming tools, or that the terrified inmates were
struggling to get out.
In the house a woman could be heard plaintively mourning, once in a
while her voice breaking into a scream as some fresh and louder tumult
sounded in the barn.
“That’s the widder Abilene Snell that owns this stand,” explained the
man solemnly. “She was jest gittin’ over the hysterics she had this
noon. Us and el’phunt was here once before this to-day. She’s an awful
high-strung woman. I shouldn’t wonder if this second trip would fix
her.”
The showman did not hesitate.
He clapped his hat on his head and rushed into the barn. The men flocked
together, the word having passed that Hime Look had at last arrived to
claim his own.
For a little space there was utter silence in the barn---Imogene
evidently listening in an attempt to determine whether this new arrival
were friend or foe. Then there sounded joyful trumpetings as the
exhausted and frightened animal recognised her master. The men could
hear Hiram’s voice soothing her, and after a time he appeared at the
tie-up door.
“I’ve got another time and place,” he said, addressing them as they came
crowding up to him, “for tellin’ you all what I think of a parsul of men
that will chase a poor elephant nearly to death. I ain’t goin’ to tell
you now. I’ve been runnin’ too long. I ain’t got breath enough. When I
start in to tell you I shall need a lot of it.”
“Well, we got your brother Phin’s word to come after her,” said one
of the bystanders, sulkily. “There ain’t any of us got any partic’lar
relish for an el’phunt bee, but we come ’cause he asked us to.”
“You may be good barn-raisers,” returned the showman angrily, “but what
you snoozers don’t know about elephants would make up the most that’s so
about ’em.”
Several women came to the door of the house and one of the men called to
them:
“Tell Mis’ Snell that the man that owns the animile has come to git her.
There ain’t no more danger.”
The mournings within ceased promptly and a plump and fair matron
appeared among the women on the door-stoop.
“What have you got to say for yourself, lettin’ loose such critters
to ruin and destroy?” she demanded, with the ready and hot anger that
succeeds fright.
Hiram, still framed in the tie-up door, took off his hat gallantly.
“It ain’t any doin’s of mine, marm,” he said. “Prob’ly a kinder or
sweeter-tempered elephant than Imogene is has never teased for peanuts
over a guard-rope. But it don’t improve no dispositions to be chased by
a pack of goramuses--it wouldn’t improve your disposition, it wouldn’t
improve mine.”
“Don’t you go to classin’ me with your menagerie, yourself included,”
she snapped. “What I want to know is, who’s goin’ to pay me for the
damage that’s been done here to-day? It ain’t goin’ to be no shillin’
and a thank-ye settlement, now, I can tell ye that.”
Hiram came out of the tie-up door and trudged forward a few steps.
“I’m a widder, but you needn’t think you are goin’ to jew me one cent’s
wuth,” she flung at him.
“I’ve got forty thousand dollars in the bank, and I don’t care who knows
the same,” retorted Hiram, “and I stand good for all bills incurred by
me or Imogene--now don’t you forget that for a second.”
He started across the yard toward the widow, for this arm’s-length
conversation, with so many eavesdroppers, annoyed him. The persecuted
Imogene had been trying to squeeze through the narrow alley from the
barn floor. Now that she had recovered her friend and defender she did
not propose to lose him again. With an eagerness candid and child-like,
she sought safety at his side.
“I want you to understand that though I’m a widder I ain’t without
friends and protectors,” said Mrs. Snell. “The bill for damages will be
sent to Cap’n Nymphus Bodfish, at P’lermo, and he’ll have full power to
act for me. And now if you’ll take your el’phunt in tow and git off my
primises I’ll be much obleeged to you. I’ve been through all I want to
for one day.”
The name of Bodfish acted on the showman almost galvanically.
“Him,” he muttered, “settle with him? Not by a----”
He strode across the yard.
“You and me----” He began, but at that instant Imogene, who had heard
his voice in the space before the barn, whirled from her attempt to
squeeze through the tie-up and crashed out through the big doors. With
screams the women jammed back into the entry and slammed the door. The
men in the yard ran in all directions.
“Go back, Imogene!” the showman shouted wrathfully, but the anxious
beast ambled sidewise toward him, waving her trunk appealingly.
He jumped at her and threw up his arms. She stopped and gazed
reproachfully, and came toward him again.
“I say, she won’t hurt a soul,” he shouted, but the women kept up their
clamour in the house, and the men were hidden in the dusk. Then his
anger wreaked itself on the only thing in sight--and that was the amazed
Imogene.
There was a pile of fitted wood in the yard, and he began to bombard her
with it. She retreated a few steps, and then bowing her devoted head,
received the missiles meekly, yet with an evident determination to stay
that touched the showman’s heart.
“Poor old gal,” he muttered, “you’re worth all the rest put together.
But there ain’t no Widder Snell goin’ to pass me and my bus’ness along
to Cap Nymp’ Bodfish, and if this is the place where that old wharf-rat
thinks he’s goin’ to nest in the sweet by-and-by--well, no man ever
kicked me in the face and eyes of the public before!”
He set his teeth with obstinate resolve and walked up and rapped on the
widow’s door. When it was not opened to him he pushed vigorously,
and two women who had been holding it ran away into the sitting-room,
screaming that the elephant was coming.
But it was only Hiram who appeared to the terrified widow, backed into a
corner and surrounded by her retinue of comforters.
“Mis’ Snell,” said Hiram, bowing low and striving for an especial
purpose of his own to put his best foot forward, “a man ain’t to be
judged by first appearances nor while standin’ in a dooryard in the dark
tryin’ to handle an elephant that’s been scared to death by tomrotted
fools. Now, I can see that you’re a lady that’s used to the world and
that’s too polite and ladylike to refuse to have an understand when a
gentleman comes to you humbly like I do.”
He noted the little flush on the widow’s fair cheek and reflected that
Captain Bodfish displayed eminent good taste.
“I hope it won’t ever be said of me that I didn’t know my manners,”
replied Mrs. Snell, with pride, but visibly affected by Hiram’s gallant
admiration and homage.
“And as it is allus best when talkin’ private and personal bus’ness
to make that bus’ness strickly personal and private,” continued Hiram,
bowing to the women, who now stood back from the widow, “I feel that
I ain’t askin’ too great a favour from you, Mis’ Snell, if you could
arrange it so that we could have the room to ourselves.”
The women retired to the kitchen with no very good grace.
As Hiram began to speak there was a queer fumbling and rustling at the
window, and the widow turned and with difficulty repressed a cry. There
stood Imogene, with the lamp-light touching the broad head pushed close
to the glass. She was blinking appealing eyes, and with the “thumb” of
her trunk was feeling along the sash in an aimless, selfconscious way.
“Now, marm,” expostulated the showman, “that elephant is tamer than a
tab cat, ’cause a cat will scratch and that elephant wouldn’t harm
a hair--a single spear of your--your--” (Hiram let it come out, but
bashfully)--“your pretty head. It’s affection that brings her to that
window--affection for me. She’s the only one in the world that cares a
rap for me--but it shows that I ain’t all bad when an animile can love
me like that.”
He sighed and the widow looked at him with new interest. She apparently
forgot the elephant at the window, and in a few minutes she certainly
had forgotten Imogene’s presence, for she was leaning forward toward
Hiram and listening intently.
The women were listening as intently at the crack of the kitchen door,
but Hiram spoke low and rapidly and they could not understand. But the
interview must have altered Mrs. Snell’s opinion of Hiram Look, for at
the end of half-an-hour she came to the kitchen door and said:
“I wish you’d plan to stay here with me to-night, Nellie.”
The young woman assented.
“My nerves ain’t jest all right yet,” continued the widow, and then she
looked them all boldly in the eye, though her cheeks were red, “and I’ve
asked Mr. Look to stop all night and put his elephant in the barn.
It would be an awful traipse for him to travel ’way back to P’lermo
to-night, and I really feel that I could get to like elephants, he has
talked to me so nice about ’em.”
She went to a cupboard in a corner, took down a box of sweetmeats,
carried them into the sitting-room, and, to the inexpressible horror
of the women, shoved up the window at which Imogene was still wistfully
fumbling. With fingers that trembled at first she dropped a few bits of
the candy into the animal’s moist “porringer,” and Imogene tucked them
into her mouth and munched with supreme satisfaction. The widow fed the
candy to the last bit, manifestly enjoying the comments on her bravery.
Then she carried the lantern to the barn when Hiram led the elephant
away to domicile her for the night.
“I don’t want to draw no wrong conclusions nor do anyone wrong in my
thoughts,” said Mrs. Wes Johnson, on her way home that evening, speaking
to a woman who walked with her. “But if I was any judge I should say
that Cap’n Nymphus Bodfish better be lookin’ to his buttons in a certain
quarter.”
“By the style she spit out there before us all tonight, you might think
her intentions was serious toward him,” commented the other.
“I know they’re serious,” replied the other with decision. “Nymp’ has
made his brags already, and I’m knowin’ to it that she’s been havin’
extra sewin’ done.”
“You don’t s’pose she’d mitten him now, do you?’ asked the other in
horrified tones.
“Well, I don’t want to wrong nobody,” said Mrs Johnson, “but if I was
goin’ to say, I shouldn’t be that Cap Nymp’ Bodfish would get Abby Snell
till I see ’em comin’ down the aisle together. I tell ye, when a man’s
got forty thousand to put into the bank ’side of the twenty thousand
that Number One left to ye, a woman does a little second-thought
thinkin’.”
The Widow Snell stayed awake a long time that night, listening to the
distant rumble of Hiram’s snores shuddering under the door of the best
room. Possibly she was fulfilling Mrs. Johnson’s prediction about second
thoughts.